Casino economics and 401K's

Factual Questions
1

I know that the lifeblood of the big casinos are the “whales”, gamblers who can drop a million bucks in a weekend and shrug it off. What I wonder about are the other group of people who keep the lights flashing - retirees. Anyone who has been to Las Vegas has seen them, even moreso in the small local Indian, riverboat, and other casinos - the 60 and 70-somethings lined up shoulder to shoulder plugging quarters into the slots all day long.

I was at a meeting at Harrah’s a month ago and it seems that this is the demographic this particular casino lives on. These people either go on a regular basis and drop $100 and go home, or they save up for a few days in Vegas every year. They know that even if they lose everything, there’ll still be that pension check from IBM or GM or Monsanto in the mailbox next week.

My question is, given the low rate of saving in this country and the extinction of pension plans in favor of 401K’s and the like, what does this mean for the future of these casinos? Do the casinos see this as a looming problem or is this not as big of a problem as it looks to me?

2

No facts, no cites, sorry, but my guess: if pension plan tightness were to cut into the 60- or 70-year-old demographic, the casinos would do the best they could with the demographic they could draw - which wouldn’t be bad. “The game never ends when your whole world depends on the turn of a friendly card.”

As with other change, it would depend a bit on how abrupt the change was, and how quickly the casinos could turn around their marketing. Still, a lot of the attraction in Vegas is the big-name entertainment - which you wouldn’t figure was there so much to attract the fixed income types. No disrespect intended: I want to be old some day.